


She Lives on Love Street

by blesser



Series: Leng T'che (Death by a Thousand Cuts) [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abigail centric, Alternatively Titled: Wolf Trap a Love Story, Blink And You Miss It Murder Accusations, Domestic Entrapmnent, House Arrest Blues, M/M, Murder Family Values, Music, Overcoming Trauma, Will Grahams Unlimited Supply of Identical Sweaters, den building, found family trope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-10 07:47:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13497732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blesser/pseuds/blesser
Summary: There follows a proud, perfect beat.“I can’t sleep,” Abigail offers in time, “my bed’s on fire.”To his credit, Will tries to keep the smile in, but he just ends up looking like a man with a mouthful of pliers trying to stop his teeth from coming out.***I would like to see what happens / she has wisdom and knows what to do / she has me and she has you





	She Lives on Love Street

**Author's Note:**

  * For [abby82](https://archiveofourown.org/users/abby82/gifts).



> Written for three important reasons: because Abigail needed a voice in this Wolf Trap triptych of sorts, because the lovely abby82 called me out of hiding (thank you, I hope I didn't burst the soap bubble) and because they stupidly put that one bit in the show where Will makes a Doors reference. Fools.

Despite his headache which, he says, _feels like a fish hook in the cortex,_ Will heads out to Port Haven at noon.

He has to sign off on some insurance forms for Abigail’s release and medication, which doesn’t help her with the twisted feeling. She squirms as though she is some sickly, broken child they’ve brought home from the hospital. Guilt is a new friend to Abigail, first it was eight girls, then nine and now when she see's Will's blankly pale expression, she feels like she weilded the metaphorical fishing rod herself.

Tugging on snow boots, Will necks about six aspirin dry as Abigail watches from where she loiters moodily in the hallway between the kitchen and main room.

On the way out of the door Will mumbles something in Abigail’s direction about a shotgun on the den wall, he almost maybe half smiles. Then he sighs like it’s the only way he knows how to exhale air and is stepping out into the blinding whiteout of the porch.

“-and there’ll be the fee for the damage to the fence to settle of course,” Hannibal is saying, bustling past Abigail with a brief, firm touch to her elbow and reaching for car keys that have somehow ended up in the bowl by the door.

Will, blindingly lit and passive faced, pats his many jacket pockets like a nervous man who’s racked up a thousand dollar restaurant bill. Wallet located, he nods once, tightly. Abigail is still glaring down at the rug, busy wondering what he might have in the photo space of that wallet as Hannibal’s inappropriately shiny shoes follow him out of the house and his voice fades out into the front yard, still talking about money.

Apparently, Will Graham likes to sigh his way through paying for other people’s messes and Hannibal Lecter likes to drive him to that place.

Drifting to watch from the open porch door, Abigail steps a single bare toe into a patch of ice on the frozen deck and suddenly it’s as if the digit isn’t there at all; immediately numb no matter how she fights it. Like a little snared rabbit.

The look Will casts between the house and the Virginia PD patrol car in the driveway is positively terrifying. It’s like he’s telling them about the shotgun too, only with his eyeballs alone. Abigail catches Hannibal’s gaze over the top of the Bentley as he attempts to scrape the windows and sees her own sly-smiled delight reflected there.

The snowfall is not romantic or dust-like. It is heavy and violent and, despite the midday winter sun, the Bentley headlights are on, bouncing down the long drive. Abigail waits until the snow covers over the tracks before she looks down. Her left big toe is still there, albeit a little blue.

She is wholly alone.

With great effort she pulls all of her body back into the dark, warmth of the house and slams the door, inexplicably out of breath.

Sliding down the shut door to the floor, Abigail wonders at the feeling of _space_ , how this is the first time she has been in a building with no other life for weeks and weeks. _Human life_ , she mentally corrects as an enormous shaggy wall of brown fur hunkers down beside her.

Everything in Minnesota was always bright and so, so yellow, the house and the trees, everything sickly stuck in that fall palate of near-death. Even the interior, the washed out décor, the buttery daisy wallpaper in the sitting room. But here, with the whiteness of Wolf Trap serving as a blank canvas, the inside of Will’s house is a photo negative of her parents house, all warm brown, rich dark chocolate. Every wall in this house looks like it is part of the forest, as though Abigail is in her own treehouse with a lock on the door. All the wood fittings are mahogany and the paper is tactile and very green, _alive_.

From her spot on the floor, even the view is a sea of legs, mismatched chairs, oddly cluttered worktables and dogs. Safe and sylvan. Abigail pushes her face into the clean smelling scruff and the dog draped on her lap growls in approval.

When she is done acting wretched, like a child waiting on the doormat and peeking through the letterbox for lights in the driveway, Abigail shifts her snoring blanket aside and sets to snooping.

As she moves _-a half invited ghost in the house-_ there is trepidation in her fingertips as they walk over the spines of books. They range from heavily bookmarked academic texts and clearly unread great American hardback novels to well-thumbed airport paperbacks and a surpsrising amount of earthy recipe books. Abigail wonders if there are less serious titles elsewhere, maybe some procedural crime, love stories or a celebrity biography. The thought makes her bark a laugh aloud and three dogs agree.

The house is enormous, goes back for at least another four rooms downstairs alone, and yet, like a cluttered but simple magnet, Will seems to live out of these two rooms alone.

About an hour passes; she squints up at the signatures on hazy landscape watercolours, pokes at the ceramic dogs on the windowsill, takes note of all the dust on everything but the piano, sifts through a sizable pantry and opens draws to find utensils that are smudged but blood free. As if she expected anything different.

Abigail takes an enormous red apple from the brown paper bag on the side and fixes a mug of some kind of flowery tea which has the word sleep on the tin about forty times. Jaw cracking in a yawn, she retreats upstairs.

*

Later, when everybody has come home and circled quietly and then skulked to their respective corners to nap after a slapdash, garlicky, burnt-bacon dinner -courtesy of Abigail- still lingering in the air and all the dogs at rest, the house settles. In response Abigail shuffles herself out of bed.

The attic stairs, like everything in Wolf Trap, are a creaking ship-wreck affair. Despite her soft tread that is both hunter and deer, Abigail can’t help but announce her presence in the living room by way of a cacophony of squeaking boards.

Nothing moves in the dark, not the dogs nor the lump under the covers, not even Hannibal, who is sprawled comfortably and neatly in a bottle green lazboy. An upturned hardcover book rises and falls evenly on his chest. Certain that he is awake, in that specifically reptilian manner, Abigail still starts when he waits until she is nearly at his elbow before speaking. She glares at his passive face, still closed eyes.

“ _Abigail_.”

She jumps a fraction out of her skin and emits a long sigh of tempestuousness until he finally looks up at her through one half opened eye. She knows despite being backlit by the eerie moon that she must look frightened rather than frightful because Hannibal is all business all of a sudden, positively dripping with human concern.

“What is it?”

With a sharp jut of her chin towards the bed, she shifts, her shadow wraith-like and ten feet tall in the blue light.

“He ok?” she chews her lip.

Will, true to character, makes as much noise when he sleeps as he does when he lives; each slow breath almost purposefully quiet, as though wary of taking up too much space in the room, his _own_ room even.

“He’s breathing, if that’s what you’re concerned about,” Hannibal, who was probably concerned himself about this not twenty minutes before, quips.

“He’s usually breathing,” Abigail huffs, “it’s the fainting that concerns me, and-”

Hannibal, an ironic therapist in many respects, seems to hate asking leading questions for an answer when he knows he is going to get it anyway. It’s as though it is too close to begging for his liking, Abigail thinks darkly.

True to form, he waits for her to continue, nonchalantly picking the book off his chest and trying to squint at the page number as though he has all the time in the world.

Abigail plucks the book from his hands.

For one briefly horrifying moment, Hannibal casts her a look of swift shock that she’s never seen before. She knows better than to think she’s surprised him, it’s more likely he is worried for her sake what might happen if she folds the page corner down. It’s the look her father once wore when she came home from a rare day in the city with some store bought, mass produced leather satchel slung over her shoulder.

Carefully, because she isn’t ready to die for offenses against literature any more than she wanted the lecture on mass-slaughter and irresponsible sourcing, Abigail tucks a wayward fly feather –shockingly orange- into the page and discards the book on a patch of moonlit desk.

“- _and_ ,” she finally hisses, “when you were out- well, I think maybe you should come take a look.”

Nearly forty eight hours solidly spent in cars or one firm-cushioned chair or another is nothing but bone popping activity and Abigail sympathises, but isn’t sure who creaks more on the way up; the stairs or Hannibal. She doesn’t comment on it, too distracted by what she found in the attic earlier and, bizarrely, by the blue wash of light on the carpet tread that is so oceanlike she is suddenly possessed with the intense desire to swim. She imagines what a relief it would be to be free from the beams, dust and clean but close air of this house.

*

“What the hell is that?”

Abigail is as close to hysterical as Hannibal has probably ever seen her, which, given their short but bloodied history together is impressive. Abigail can almost feel his interest spiking as he follows her line of sight across the attic floorboards. There’s an inevitable collection of junk at the end of the room, in the dark corner. Although she made the tracks earlier herself, Abigail silently agrees that it looks more like some _one_ has been dragged through the dust than some _thing_.

“I didn’t mean to,” she frowns, “I was just so bored and I-”

Abigail lowers her voice as though Hannibal is approaching a lion and not just a heap of attic junk.

"-I don't believe this."

As he leans into the space, Hannibal’s hands twitch at his sides and Abigail suddenly wishes he was wearing gloves and something to protect from the dust that clings like icing sugar on a Christmas cake. But then she remembers, they’re both wearing borrowed sweaters anyway, and stays silent as he reaches past some discarded frames and unpacked cardboard boxes and into the chest that Abigail hunted out earlier.

“I don’t believe this,” she says again unnecessarily, chewing her lip, "what is that doing in his _house?"_

“Abigail,” Hannibal gets his hands on it, an odd expression on his face, “Abigail, get the light.”

*

The walls are jumping.

With the usual drumroll announcement made by the old farmhouse steps, Will appears in the doorway to find them both lying on the attic floor.

Hannibal is spinning a waxy vinyl case on his finger demonstratively and telling Abigail a long story about how the Chef in Naples taught him the art of _schiaffo._ For her part, Abigail is laughing appropriately.

They are both laughing in a late-night hysterical way completely laugh drunk on the unusualness of the situation. Abigail feels like something has loosened in her very lungs, like she left all of her body out on the porch earlier to freeze. It’s a giddiness only house arrest can give.

“This seems,” Will says hoarsely over the music, gesticulating the booming record player and the raided chest of vinyls, “pretty fucking outlandish.”

There follows a proud, perfect beat.

“I can’t sleep,” Abigail offers in time, “my bed’s on fire.”

To his credit, Will tries to keep the smile in, but he just ends up looking like a man with a mouthful of pliers trying to stop his teeth from coming out. He ducks his head uselessly but Abigail, who, with a blossom bud of something in the ballpark of pride in her chest, can see his shoulders shaking slightly.

There is an odd unity, like a badly acted play or a forced joke, to all of them laughing together. Not once have they stood on even footing. Since day one no emotional spirit level has ever been anything but ricocheting and sliding in their tangled little dynamic.

“Sorry we woke you,” Hannibal says, not sounding sorry at all and still smiling.

Will puts his hands in his pockets. He looks less tired, which is something he’s never looked before. And when he leans full-body on the door jamb, it’s not like he usually does, as though it’s all that is keeping him up. He leans like a person who has heard of casual posture might, someone _at ease_.

“I'm sorry I interrupted, this looks like quite the event,” Will moves into the room, towards the dark and the turntable. He slides a dial smoothly till the refrain dims a fraction, just enough to take the wince off his face.

“So what did she do, the chef in the pizzeria?”

Hannibal, who is pretty comfortably reclined in a sprawl against a broken chaise lounge and, because he can never _not_ finish a good story, shrugs one shoulder for effect.

“Well, then,” he links his fingers behind his head, leans into them, “she slapped me and said in quick, cutting Italian: and with that, the lesson is over!”

Abigail laughs. A louder than necessary laugh like that of a funeral wake, an air-clearing kind of jolliness. It is not forced but it is infectious.

“A brave woman,” Will has his back to them and is absently flipping through the records that haven’t become Abigail and Hannibal’s victims yet.

Those are spilt like guts onto the rug, poked and examined and rifled.

“She was spirited yes. And made an excellent final dinner.”

The track jumps, scratchy.

“In Naples was it?”

 It’s a loaded question, fired in the shape of a pin on a map.

“Oh Will,” Abigail breezes, “how is it you live out here and you don’t have a bath tub, or a colour television, or a sense of humour,” she wipes at dust and tears of mirth from her cheeks, “but you have at least ten Fleetwood Mac records?”

“Hey now,” Will says affronted, looking to Hannibal reflexively and obviously casting about for a second opinion.

Hannibal shrugs and catches the net for him.

“I think that a Federal Agent and profiler of the criminally insane listening to Psycho Killer, past midnight, under surveillance and house protection, is in fact, a sign of healthy wit.”

“Special,” Will amends, not quite smiling, “Agent.”

“Quite.”

“I appreciate the irony and while I’m sure our detail from the VPD do too, don’t you think it’s a little loud?” Will crumples his nose like a disgruntled old man, “I thought I’d woken up in a frat house.”

“Yes Will, tell us about that,” Abigail pushes herself up off the floor, she’s got dust patches on her knees and when she stands the borrowed plaid shirt hem covers them, just. Oh how she itches for a fresh set of clothes.

“Congratulations, Abigail, I went to college.”

“With the real boys and girls?”

Will can’t seem to stop looking down at the makeshift den on the floor, all the blankets and records and a couple of dreadful, curly haired photographs and the cushion Abigail has made from a stack of manila folders and things. For somebody who’s just got up from sleep, Will sure suddenly looks like he wants to lay straight back down again, as though looking at your past is exhausting work. Abigail can appreciate that one day, when she looks back on recent events, she might feel the same sense of overwhelming weight and fatigue.

With all the ease of sliding a bullet into a clip, Will spins a new record under the needle and does, in fact, just that. He just simply… lays right down, takes up a space on the rug between them, hands folded neatly on his stomach. He looks like the attic is just another crime scene there for him to interpret.

Abigail flops back too, one foot propped up on her other leg. Her toes are moving in time to the new song, which is sweeter and nonsensical and has a tripping beat that doesn’t jump the beams as much.

Abigail watches as a big dust bunny dances free from her sock and bounces out of sight.

“Have you ever been to a boat yard?” Will turns his head and levels Hannibal with a look, “and no, the Baltimore harbour orchestra house doesn’t count.”

Hannibal snaps his mouth shut, pleased as a crocodile.

“This feels like that,” Will closes his eyes, drums his fingers, “just smells better.”

“My dad had an old tape deck he took around everywhere, to every site,” Abigail says suddenly, the words pouring out of her mouth like shards from a screw cutter but lacking the sharp edges, “It was dreadful, God awful music.”

“Working music,” Will says, nodding in an upside down sort of way against the floorboards.

“Right.”

There is a lovely pause while each of them thinks very different thoughts that surmount to the same thing: _killing music_.

“Cooking music,” Hannibal offers, upbeat, “is useless unless one can really feel it in the ribcage.”

Abigail squints up at the beams and the roof eaves, all the dark parts of the attic.

She stares cross eyed until the dimly orange filament in the lone, naked bulb is engrained on her vision. The coil is a question mark on her closed eyelids, a sparkler clutched in her ten year old hand as she wished she had a shorter name to write in the sticky July air.

It’s a glow worm, that light, a migraine, the stars beyond the roof, it is electric.

“Will,” she says with an apology on her tongue tip, she wants to ask about the fence and who paid for it, for the insurance documents, for the smashed glass, the heating in every room in this big old, sad house…

He grunts eloquently. Waiting.

Abigail twists her fingers in the far too long cuffs at her wrists.

“This isn’t dreadful, God awful music,” she says, clearing her throat.

“Well there’s one point in my favour then.”

“You haven’t got cushions made of human hair either,” she offers, suddenly wicked and blinking away the imprint hard, “I checked.”

“A true accomplishment,” Will shifts against the floor and narrows his eyes beadily at her, wry as anything, “apparently I don’t have cushions at all, is that my PhD under your head?”

“I don’t know _Doctor_ , is it?”

“Please don’t be a brat Abigail.”

“It’s this music,” she says, “it is effecting my teenage soul.”

“It’s no Simone Kermes,” Hannibal remarks, blandly in character.

“You hate it,” Will sneers back cheerfully. It isn’t a question.

Hannibal probably does hate it, but like Abigail he can probably feel the low hum under Will’s breath and the gleeful drum of his fingers on the floorboard that is –at last- a sound louder than the pond of worry in the house that’s been stagnating over the last two days.

“Hate is a seasoning to be used sparingly,” Hannibal intones drolly.

“Something you learnt in a Naples pizzeria?”

“I certainly didn’t learn it in a communal dorm kitchen at Louisiana State,” there is no bite to Hannibal’s words, in fact, he sounds odd and fond.

“Nobody learns mercy in a dorm.”

“Just hollow pride?”

“Hollow?” Will says in a dry monotone, “Go Tigers.”

They sound like Abigail’s parents used to, when their voices would carry up through the walls, her mother shrill and her father notable only in the meek, intense silences. There is something louder here, an overall more _insulated_ feel about the Wolf Trap house. As though it is somehow warmer even under the constant curse of winter, like the unseeable interior of the cottage in a snowglobe. It’s darker too and soft like a worn and loved dogs bed.

Abigail keeps her eyes closed. They have fluttered shut in gentle rest and not screwed up in fear, which is a refreshing change of late, not to be so sickeningly afraid.

So she keeps her eyes closed and she floats and she is a wind chime against the sea of baroque pop shifting the attic walls. Somehow comfortable even with a frame and folders digging into her scalp, she lets the low, warm, argumentative tangle of voices and the piano drift her away and up towards the dark place in the ceiling.

When sleep finally comes for her, she goes over the edge with two impossible thoughts on her mind; one is the sound of Will Graham laughing, earnest, dark and genuinely pleased, like a low rumble of thunder when you’re safe indoors. The other is the idea that tomorrow she can leave this house, walk into the trees until she reaches a lake and swim in its fresh icy water and never look back. She can change her clothes and change her name and never have to see a cheerful, butterfly print hospital gown again.

But Abigail knows the day tomorrow will start with cracking eggs and quick fire rapport sniping over cheap coffee that makes Hannibal narrow his eyes but Abigail think of a thermos and good, true days in hunting blinds. There will undoubtedly be a fresh, scratchy sweater over the chair waiting for her and unread books on a wall to ceiling shelf and old sixties rock blues songs she’s never heard in the air and dogs bumping against her knees, the sound of the timbers of Wolf Trap straining against them all, their rare laughter, the music, the fresh and heavy snow on the porch roof.

Abigail would happily stay in the dark and this one ratty sweatshirt forever if it felt this much like home, smelt like her charred attempt at a thank you dinner, a thank you for so many things; her life –twice- the cost of a fence and a broken window and a row of butterfly stitches, the lack of judgement in not one but two sets of eyes, a mug of whiskey, a place where she can lay on the floorboards and sing tunelessly along to a song she doesn’t know the words too and finally find, not peace exactly, but peace enough to sleep.

A good _-uninterrupted by quaking nightmares-_ sleep is something that no change of clothes, no change of name and not even a baptism in a clear lake can compete with.

**Author's Note:**

> The song that wakes Will is, of course, Psycho Killer by Talking Heads because whilst it may be a very done joke, it's still completely hilarious to me. He then puts on Love Street by The Doors, which gets the title credit and the b-side of which is Hello, I Love You and is what Abigail falls asleep too whilst Hannibal and Will argue -quietly- until the needle slips. Oh, and you can pry Will Graham at 1am pouring over hideous crime scene imagery and listening to Little Lies out of my cold dead hands.


End file.
